AIS satellite tracking provider recommendations

[vpbarkley]

Any recommendations for AIS satellite tracking providers?

Wanting to track a single vessel that is out of range of AIS terrestrial tracking.

Have looked at fleetmon and marine traffic. Thank you.

[StuM]

Originally Posted by vpbarkley

Any recommendations for AIS satellite tracking providers?

Wanting to track a single vessel that is out of range of AIS terrestrial tracking.

Have looked at fleetmon and marine traffic. Thank you.

Does it have Class A or Class B AIS ? If the latter, then none of them are much use.


For Class A, I am quite happy with marinetraffic.com

[goboatingnow]

MarineTraffic has two paid tiers ( Undelayed and 12h delayed ) for sat tracking

[vpbarkley]

The AIS unit is class B. I've had no trouble tracking it on the free, MarineTraffic site.

Unfortunately, the free MarineTraffic site is limited to terrestrial tracking.

Terrestrial coverage extends out about 5 NM from shore.

Any coverage beyond that requires satellite tracking.

It appears that sites offering satellite AIS tracking are pay sites.

Fleetmon offers a flexible arrangement where you purchase any amount of tokens.

The tokens are used to purchase any number of trackings.

If anyone knows more about this topic then please chime in. Thank you.

[requiem]

Five miles seems a bit short; I'd expect much more. From a quick glance at my app I see some vessels over 30 miles out; a sailboat with an antenna atop the mast should have decent range, even before factoring in the shore station.

[goboatingnow]

Marine traffic provides free sat tracking but it’s significantly delayed



Note that the free tier will merely display the ship on a global map. To actually extract position information you must access the paid tier( there are several )

[Moontide]

I've been able to get an exact Lat/Long on the free Marinetraffic page. I just zoom in until boat in question is separate from others. As a workaround can just zoom in far enough to figure out location using landmarks. (if not too far offshore)

[Peeew]

I believe that once out of coastal tracking the class B will show up when it passes close to a class A AIS ship that will occasionally upload the AIS received info. So a class B can be tracked offshore on a very irregular basis.

[Kd9truck]

(Does predictwind provide? That would make sense )

[Sailmonkey]

Originally Posted by Peeew

I believe that once out of coastal tracking the class B will show up when it passes close to a class A AIS ship that will occasionally upload the AIS received info. So a class B can be tracked offshore on a very irregular basis.

That would require that the class A unit act as a repeater. I’m 98% sure that is not the case. Class B with its lower transmit power just requires more perfect atmospheric conditions to be seen by satellites than the A transmitters.

[s/v Jedi]

Originally Posted by StuM

Does it have Class A or Class B AIS ? If the latter, then none of them are much use.


For Class A, I am quite happy with marinetraffic.com

The SOTDMA class B transceivers are fully supported for satellite AIS.